Tag: incompetence

On conspiracy theories

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

Okay. So you’ve noticed the shitgibbon’s long and abiding relationship with professional wrestling, and you know that wrestlers cut themselves on purpose all the time, and you don’t believe that a bullet fired from an AR-15 can graze someone for some reason,(*) and you think the assassination attempt was faked.

Okay. Fine. You go ahead and do that. Think whatever you like.

But before you spout that shit where I can see it, I’m going to insist that you explain the two dead people and the two injured people. And you’re going to have to do so in such a way that it makes more sense than that a nut job got ahold of a gun, took a shot at someone, barely missed, and the Secret Service, around someone whose single greatest skill as a human being might be his ability to surround himself at all times with utterly fucking incompetent people, fucked up.

Because I’m entirely willing to believe in a world where someone missed a shot and cops fucked up. That sounds just like America to me.

I have nothing else to say about this, other than the paragraph to follow, which is more about math than it is about politics.

(*) If it is possible for an AR-15 bullet to hit someone and blow their head off, and if it is possible for an AR-15 bullet to miss someone, than somewhere in between those two places there literally must be some distance where the bullet does damage– and an ear wound is going to bleed like a bitch even if it’s a small cut– that is not fatal. This isn’t even the first president who didn’t get killed due to amazing fucking luck. Teddy Roosevelt had a bullet basically bounce off a speech in his pocket. Andrew Jackson had someone come after him with two pistols and they both misfired, leading to Jackson beating the hell out of his assailant with his cane. The idea that it is impossible for a bullet to barely miss may be the dumbest conspiracy theory in a wild thicket of dumb conspiracy theories.

In which my head explodes

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

I am deeply tempted to upload today’s entire assignment so you can see it. I thought it was going to be an easy Halloween blowoff, ten dead-simple story problems, most of which boiled down to “multiply these two numbers together,” and maybe two of which boiled down to “divide these two numbers.” Like, this is the first question:

Six spooky scary skeletons each send shivers down seven spines. How many shivers are sent?

Only 33 of the 59 students who have completed the assignment managed to figure out to multiply six and seven to get 42.

Also, I have 142 students and as of 3:15 only 59 have completed the assignment.

I don’t know how to fix middle school students who literally can’t figure out when to multiply. They actually and genuinely don’t know what the four basic operations of mathematics are for. I’ve never not had kids who were behind, but this is shockingly bad nonetheless.

One more class period today. I can do this.

(Oh, and also, one of the biggest and most obvious lies the school corporation was telling when they were talking about us returning to class was that there were somehow going to be enough subs during a pandemic, when there are never enough subs, period. There was an email every day this week begging teachers to cover for other people who were out. Today we had five teachers out. Total number of subs: zero. They just kept saying “Oh, we’ve contracted out for that,” like that was an answer that was going to matter.)

In which I’ve made a terrible mistake

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I am roughly forty-three and three-quarters years old. For roughly 25 of those years, I have had facial hair, and for the last, oh, 15 months or so it has been long enough to be notable.

Apparently, in all that time, I have not acquired the necessary skills that “let’s trim this mess back by a couple of inches” is something I am actually capable of doing. Believe me, it came as a surprise. I thought that was something I knew how to do! But I do not. I did not intend to do this terrible thing to my face when I began “trimming” my lovely beard earlier today. And it happened anyway. I am very sorry, particularly since the children will not want to discuss anything but my face on Monday.

I am probably going to go ahead and dye it now, because it’s not like I can fuck up any further than I have.

Why not, right?

Because what I wanted from my Sunday was a massive explosion of negativity

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

…I just spent some time looking around in WordPress’ forums.  Guys, my goals for this software are simple:  I want it to:  1) allow me to write and have that writing appear on the Interwebs; and otherwise to 2) get the hell out of my way.

During the last post, one of the things that was frustrating me was that I seemed to be generating an awful lot more typos than usual– like, easily twice as many errors as I usually have when I’m writing, if not more than that.

A short amount of time investigating– be aware that I had time to take a shower since the last post, so this is a really short amount of time I’m talking about– has revealed that this “Gutenberg” thing, which is a text editor, is apparently so slow that it is possible to type too fast for it, which introduces lots of dropped spaces and missing letters.

The number I’m mostly seeing is 100 WPM or more.

I type about 120 WPM.

I type too fast for my text editor to render my letters properly, in 2018.

I’d say “unbelievable,” but I really need to purge that word from my vocabulary, because no level of incompetence or malice in any context whatsoever should be “unbelievable” any longer.  The world is just that stupid a place now.  

Oh what fresh hell is this

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

qwertee_whatever_1519078342-fullEvery time WordPress decides we need a new editor I spend some time wanting to murder things.  I’m not sure who exactly was clamoring for being able to start blog posts with drop caps, but what the hell, I’ll check them out.   Only everything is “blocks” now, and I seem to have somehow lost the ability to insert an “image” “block” into a “text” “block,” so I don’t really see how this shit helps me any.  I mean, hey, drop caps, though.

I’ve had nothing going on for the last couple of days.  I spent all day reading today, after finally finishing The Monster Baru Cormorant last night.  Which I still will need to reread at some point in the future.

Still can’t figure out how to put a picture into a block of text.  I mean, I can set wrap options on the picture, but I can’t move it.  Does that make sense?  No.  No it does not.

I can do a drop cap on every paragraph, though.

(It’s at this point where I realize that the new editor, which is going to “level up my layout,” really doesn’t seem to have an option to do images inline with text, lose all will to live, and switch back to the old editor.  Just once, just once, motherfuckers, I’d like you to roll out a new feature that works when you roll it out.  I don’t have the patience for incompetent dumbfuckery right now.  I just don’t.)

(Also, I want to point out that when I switched back to the “classic” editor, the one that, to me, is still not up to snuff with the editor before it, it got rid of one of those drop caps for no clear reason, but kept the other.  Fuuuuuck this.)